Nashville Confidential

good to know

Here's something fun I've learned: a turbo can cook automotive oil, turning it into a sludge that chokes your engine. Here's what's more fun: there is pretty much no advance warning. It's a little surprise that just arrives one day -- usually a day when you're out of warranty.

Here's what the Car Talk guys call a turbo: a TBP (triple boat payment)!

I found all the paperwork and shipped it off to my friends at the dealership today. How much longer we will be friends remains to be seen.

Stay tuned.

copycat

Not to be all "me too" in the Nashville webring, but my car has also broken down. During my triumphal return to Nashville. Where it now sits at the dealer [Muffy, I am concerned.].

Lest Saucy and Sparkwood think I'm stealing their material, let me clarify: the extent of the problem is so great I have to leave it here in Nashville with the dealer and take a rental back. During this time, the dealer will consult with the manufacturer to see if they will "help me out" on any of the [unbelievably giant] expense.

It could be worse.

Since I'm typing this from the Nashville Public Library and am about to have tea at the Hermitage Hotel, I'm holding up gracefully.

More on this in the coming days, when I'm not scouring my vast piles of post-move paperwork to find maintenance records to bolster my case.

random acts of blogness

-- Thanks to K. for the explanation of how November 6th street in Memphis got its name. Check out the comment posted this week on this entry.

-- I have been writing a lot of entries off-line. They vary wildly in tone and I'm really debating about posting them. One is very bitter and one is very sad. Who wants to read that?

-- T minus 48 hours until my triumphant return to Nashville. Please alert the marching bands.

-- I am trying to stay up for Kings of Leon on Letterman. Then I must sleep.

carpe diem

“When I run, I feel the pleasure of God.” – Chariots of Fire

My friend Dan wrote that on the back of an envelope once, and it just cracked me up. He wrote me some great letters during his first year of college, while I was starting my junior year of high school. He had been the editor of the newspaper and I inherited that from him.

Whether that statement was born of some sleep-deprived, Vangelis-on-the-radio pasteup session, I do not recall. I think it probably just struck him as funny one time, and he wrote it down, and when the letter arrived, it struck me as hilarious and absurd and I’ve always remembered it.

joystick

The bad news is, having an iPod Shuffle doesn’t make you a good dancer, no matter how cool the silhouettes in the TV ads look.

The good news is, it's worth it anyway.

In technology there are consumers known as “first adapters,” or Guys Who Run Out and Buy It Immediately. I’m the other end of the spectrum. I didn’t have a CD player until 1992. I still miss my turntable (and the liner notes of LPs). As you might guess, I’m not a big downloader.

So how did Apple get me? Sheer price. At $99 bucks, I couldn't sit it out any longer. And there were three things that tempted me: design, capacity and iTunes.

now seating: bitter, party of one

Dear Dave Alvin,

Please accept this apology for missing not one, not two, but three of your shows that took place within a 200-mile radius of my home this weekend. I want to reassure you that I tried. Mightily. It’s almost comical how much I tried.

But I forgot how hard it is to attend a concert when you are not in Music City, USA. I forgot about all the preparation and planning and effort. I forgot you really should buy a ticket in advance. (Oh yes, Dave, I was there at the Chicago-area venue, but was turned away from the sold-out show. That part wasn’t so comical.)

I have tried to convince myself that it’s no big deal, that I saw you twice in the past year, with one of the shows being perhaps the second-best I experienced in 2004. But that just made it worse. It’s been a long cold quiet winter, with no live music, and I miss that feeling of the light coming out of the top of my head and the sheer joy of it all.

I wish I liked sports or shopping or something else that made me feel that way. I miss it. I’m sure I will recover my long-distance-concert-attendance skills, in time, but my attempts so far in this new year have been snowed out, sold out, and I have to tell you: I’m mad about it.

So I’m sitting here loading up my new iPod Shuffle with a lot of your music, hoping that will take some of the sting out of it in days to come. Hope to catch you at a show in the near future.

Your dejected but still devoted fan
mapgirl

wrapped up like a dooce

I can hear your fingers tapping on your mouse, waiting to click on that new weblog I promised.

Well, here's the thing: I'm not sure I can do it.

Today marks one month on the new job and it's all good. But life these days is mostly about the job, and if there's one thing I have observed from the misfortunes of others, it is this: DO NOT BLOG ABOUT WORK. Sure, it all worked out in the long run for the woman who writes dooce.com, after the firing and the post-partum and then, at long last, the NPR and New York Times coverage.

I still like my relative anonymity, and these days I can't think of how to write anything without hinting strongly at who I am, where I live, what I do, etc. (The etc. being all the stuff about the innocent bystanders: my family and colleagues.)

I am trying to find a way to write about my theory that there's a correlation between a full head of hair and ascension up the corporate ladder, or how to mention that the guy who taught my recent class was a dead ringer for Willem Dafoe's dad, or dozens of other strange and seemingly innocent observations made while Working for the Man Every Night and Day.

What to do, gentle reader? Eat sushi, of course, and see Dave Alvin live. So now you know what I'll be doing this weekend ... check back Monday and perhaps I'll have devised an elegant solution.

i've never seen both of them in the same place

I have been wondering, what ever happened to the band Bettie Serveert? This comes to mind because the woman next door to my grandma at the home is named, well, Betty Severt. So recently I learned that Bettie Serveert will be in Nashville on 6 March. I think I'll drop by the home and check on my gram's neighbor that night ...

resistance is futile

I couldn't take it anymore. I bought an iPod Shuffle off eBay. Now I'm sitting by the mailbox.

*now* you tell me

As reported today in the Norwich (Conn.) Bulletin, my long-ago employer:

At about 2:40 p.m., some local cable stations broadcast an emergency alert to evacuate the state of Connecticut by 3:10 p.m. The alert was a false alarm. A technical error caused the signal to be sent.

Something about this made me double over with laughter. Kind of makes you wonder what was bound to happen at 3:11 p.m., doesn't it? Let me tell you: If I had read seen that emergency alert in 1988, at 2:40:03, I would have been racing toward the Rhode Island border. I was just looking for a good excuse to get the heck out of there; I didn't want to seem like a quitter.

I think I have latent Connecticut issues (as I've hinted here before.) So why do I sometimes read the Bulletin's web site? Well, it's always good to have perspective.